Enterprises such as, for example, a business, a governmental agency, an educational or non-profit institution or other organization, often utilize and rely on information technology (IT) systems of varying complexity in order to assist in accomplishing or directly accomplish desired objectives of the enterprise. Thus, various assets of the enterprise's IT system including data created, updated and accessed by resources of the system, and possibly also resources external to the IT system (e.g., customers and clients), can be very important to continuing operation of an enterprise. Ensuring that such assets remain available and are recoverable in the event of an occurrence effecting one or more assets of the IT system is an important consideration.
Identifying appropriate solutions for providing such disaster recover/continuity of business capabilities within an enterprise IT system is not a trivial undertaking. One reason is that a single category of solution does not fit all enterprises. While scheduled tape-backups or the like may be appropriate for one enterprise where loss of an entire day's data is not problematic, losing one minute or even one second of data may be unacceptable to another enterprise. Likewise, taking several hours to days to recover from a problem while a tape back-up is retrieved and restored may be acceptable to one enterprise, but another enterprise may need to resume normal operations of its IT system within seconds. Furthermore, a monolithic solution across an enterprise's entire IT system, which vendors may often recommend, typically addresses the most stringent requirements and are generally not the most cost effective solution since not all assets of the IT system necessitate the most stringent solution.